The African Folk Soul of Bongos Ikwue: Beloved Nigerian Singer-Songwriter’s First U.S. Release

The 1970’s were an extremely fertile era for music. In America, progressive soul and funk broke new ground while London spawned the punk rock scene and Kingston, Jamaica gave the world roots reggae. In Nigeria, an extraordinarily diverse and dynamic cultural scene yielded not only Fela’s Afrobeat and juju’s peak with Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey but also myriad rock and funk groups such as BLO and The Funkees. One of the most popular singers on the Nigeria scene at that time was Bongos Ikwue, whose personalized style of African folk and American soul music made him completely unique

Multinational Debut Novelists Take New York

It is easy to assume that a writer’s debut novel will take an at least partially autobiographical form. We imagine authors living their stories before putting them onto paper; their voices emerge once they manage to organize their thoughts and observations into a narrative. Only then, with their distinct selves discovered, structured, and shared, are …